Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Friday, September 28, 2012

The Five Books You Meet At University

If you're a book-lover and you're heading off to start university this Freshers' week, then good luck to you. You're going to need it.

Over the next three or so years you'll see enough of the bloody things to sink the Ancient Mariner's boat, and if you're studying literature for your degree, not all of them will come to occupy a special place in your heart. In fact, some you're going to downright loathe.

Reminiscing about our own cherished years shuffling from lecture hall to lecture hall, experimenting with cider that makes your gum bleed and moaning about Moby Dick, Huffington Post Culture decided - entirely scientifically - that there are five basic books you meet at university.
Like the characters in Mitch Albom's wistful The Five People You Meet In Heaven, these are not the only books you'll enounter at university but the five that will come to define your time on campus, and ultimately haunt you as you expire from this world.
Here are ours.

THE ONE YOU REALLY FALL FORThe Romantic Poets
Aged 15 I decided my best hope of getting girls would be to become a literary type, so I scoured the shelves of my local 2nd hand book shop for volumes of poetry, selecting them purely on how dusty, decrepit - and therefore clever - they looked. It didn't take long to stumble over the Romantics, but it did take me until University to realise that Wordsworth understood my inner ache for nature, Blake articulated my views on social politics and best of all, Coleridge approved entirely of my burgeoning opium addiction. Oh - and girls on English Lit MAs were far more impressed by them than the teenagers ever used to be. - SamThomas Pynchon
Post-modernism makes a literature degree fun. The lecturers are nearly always the coolest, in a Steve Jobs kind of way. You get to watch cartoons in class and can look at your flatmate's Ikea lamp and muse, "hm, it's quite post-modernist". Yes, it can sound incredibly trite, but being introduced to elusive author Thomas Pynchon and his mad, sprawling 1960s novels (Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying Of Lot 49) was well worth my tuition fees. War books like no other, they combine sex with weapons, humour with death and leave you feeling utterly confused. Learning to appreciate an untidy ending is a valuable lesson both in literature and beyond. - AliceMore at Huff Post UK